dark willow

Inside they are just standard 720k floppy disk drives, I imagine any old PC service manual would give you the neccessary help, and there hsould be a fair bit on the internet too. If you dont like fiddly jobs, if you dont mind cutting the case slightly to fit in the different shape eject button, the old PC standard 720k drives will work just fine in many cases, though you might need to play with the jumpers a bit.

I saw the Galaxy and was taken with it, but it seems very few of them were made as I've never seen any available 2nd hand. Wether or not the full version with Ethernet ever made it out, I don't know.

I have a 50mb drive for my STe i want to reformat and partition. What is hte max partition size you can have in TOS 1.62? it'll be running with the standard AHDI 6 drivers.

In the UK, Atari Workshop sells them for a price, for the US try Best Electroinics, also for a price. However have a shot on Ebay first, you might get lucky, and you could save quite a bit

IMO, go for the Mega STe, support for SCSI hard drives is a big advantage, the CPU is 16Mhz, which can give it a decent performance advantage for real work over a Mega ST, and the VME bus gives a lot of possibilites for upgrades. That $800 recon price is just a rip off, there are plenty around on Ebay, or even if you put a wanted ad ont he forums you shoudl get some responce. Also some shops in Europe stock them for less than that too. Bear in mind with a european model, unless it's a UK British machine orginally, you may well get a foreign language TOS. However getting chips isn't that much of a problem, and you may well want to put on a new OS anyway. I know what tjlazah means about the old machines. i always wanted a Falcon but could never afford one, and now that's next on my list, though am debating about waiting for the ColdFire and just going the whole hog and getting that... and a CaTTamaran for my TT... there's no such thing as too much power.

I'm getting rid of some older programs (all original copies with manuals & boxes) and an Atari original DS-DD 720k drive. I'm selling them on Ebay, based in the UK. http://search.ebay.co.uk/_W0QQgotopageZ1QQ...osortpropertyZ1 Dark Willow

If the drive is a bit dogey nd it won't boot without a disk in, that it will be a drive problem rather than anything wrong with the OS. As for monitors, I'm afraid I don't know as have onmly ever used my systems with VGA monitors, nto the orginal Atari ones. However on VGA monitors the screen does have a large unused portion, usually fiddling round with the monitor controls means you can fill things out a bit. As has been said, for games you will need a dedicated Atari colour monitor (the SC range). There are a few colour VGA adapters on the market so I'm told (LOW and MED resolution), probabaly the best place to try for them would be Best Electronics, I think they stock them. (www.best-electronics-ca.com) As for hard disks, the built in port on the atari is Atari's own ACSI interface. You can only use Atari Megafile hard drives and a few other makes that made Atari dedicated drives (Supra and SyQuest made some I believe). However all these drives were made a olong time ago and so will have very small capacities. The Megafile itself came in 20,30 and 60mb falvours plus a special removeable drive one. The good things is ACSI drives are pretty much plug and play. The alternative is to use a host adaptor that allows the Atari to accept SCSI or IDE drives. This allows you to use more modern quicker and bigger drives. I believe the standard ST early TOS versions may only allow for drives upto 2gb, but this is more than enough on an Atari. As for connecting the Atari to the PC you don't need any fancy hardfware. You can just use a serial cable and transfer software like GhostLink (or terminal software) to copy accross files, or even just floppy disks.

if you have tried mutiple copies of the game, and it's the same error every time it's proabaly that the game is incompatible with the TOS version your system has. Games for the ST are very picky about it, and it's a kind of dark art to figure out what games runs under what TOS. The best thing would be to get hold of some ROM images of early TOS versions (pre rainbow tos) and SELTOS (an auto folder program that allows you to boot a TOS rom image instead of the TOS version in the machine) and see if it works then.

Normal ST's could have handled it without hass. I think the megaDrive could only do 16 colours as well. The way they did the graphics meade quit a light system load, no scrolling screens or anything, and the animations are done from fixed camera angels, though when your playing you don't really notice that, but it does free up resources to make what is there really neat:)

Note: TOS versions are important. All TOS versions after Rainbow TOS can format DS disks in such a way that a PC can read them. Earlier TOS versions format disks in such a way that PC's either can't read them or corrupt them. If you format the disk on the PC it HAS to be DS format even if the disk is HD. Windows 3.x,95,98,ME and 2000 are all OK with this, giving you the option. If your using XP you will need a to download one of the utility programs that allows you format disks in the old formats.

I think I remeber reading somewhere that about 7,000 TT's were made, and around 2,000 ST-Books (the ST laptop that was intended to replace the STacy, very fragile). I've never seen any figure for the Falcon's, but they were more popular than the TT so I think it'd be at least 10,000 or 12,000 probabaly more since it was intended to be a mass market machine. I'm guessing the clones were all in the hundreds.

It'd be interesting to know that of the clones that were released just how many of each were manufactured. You hear a lot about the hades but I've never even seen one in the flesh, let alone used one. Just how few of them were made?!

No it's not for standard ST's. The standar versions works on the Falcon though a TT and Mega STe version is being worked on at the moment. The board is make by Czuba Tech. Aparently the Mega/TT version works in such a way that you can use it even if you already have another VME bus card, though quite how I'm not entirely sure. http://www.czuba-tech.com

Another TOS compatible machine was the Hades, which was a bit more pwoerful than the Milan. It ran a patched TOS 3.06 (the last TOS that came on the TT). The first was 68040 based, but I believe there was a 68060 version too. It was made by Medusa systems. There is also under development at the moment the ColdFire project, which will be a 68060 based system. I'm not sure how near completion it is. neither the Milan or Hades are made anymore, unfortunately:(

This is my 520STe. Alas it's sitting idle under my desk right now as it's hard drive has died, so it's pretty much useless to my needs until such time as I can afford to get it sorted out. It's recased in a Maplin's ATX tower case which was orginally white (which looked crap, so I resprayed it black to go with the key'b and mouse, as you might just be able to see in the pic, one side panel is still white as it needed to be changed and I have not get round to spraying it yet) with a 300w ATX PSU, 4mb RAM, and type 4 Eiffel card from Satantronic. It also has an RLL hard drive controller taken from a Megafile 30, and a Panther ISA board to take an ET4000 graphics card,a 32mb RLL hard drive, TOS 1.62 and a VGA adapter. The ET4000 has been plundered from it for the Nova card I've just got the TT, though hopefully I'll get a second one later so they can both have decent screen resolutions. One thing i want to do on this system possibly swapping it's old RLL controller for a SCSI one, and using the old 50mb drive out of the TT for it when I upgrade the TT's drive to a larger one. Failing this if ST Labs IDE and memory upgrade board makes it out would be using this to add an old IDE drive to it and upgrade the RAM to 14mb. Since this is no longer my main system it will probably come down to whichever is easier and cheaper, though the STLabs design also incorporates a TOS 2.06 upgrade, and before this systems HD died I intended to fit a TOS upgrade so might kill two birds with one stone. And here's the TT. I've only just got this machine so haven't had a chance to do anything much with it yet. it's fitted with TOS 3.06, 2mb ST ram, 16mb TT ram and a 50mb SCSI drive and is connected to an old 15" Dell SVGA monitor and has an AT bus mouse. It's a german machine complete with German TT keyboard and desktop. I have a Nova graphics card adapter which I'm going to use with the ET4000 from the STe, and give it an ethernet connection (if it makes it out, possibly the VME bus version of the CT-link, as USB support could be useful), and either get the TOS reprogrammed to the UK English version or possibly get English MagiC instead. Also on the cards at some point when money permits. *Bigger hard drive (850mb upward) *CaTTamaran board *CD-RW The pink fluffy bunny sitting behind the monitor was an "ironic" present. The small statue next to the monitor is of my digital namesake:)

I'd imagine it would be possible to adapt it for the Lynx. Shame never made it to the ST! Still great fun on the MD:)

Yay to the control panel idea, very user friendly to those who just want to get on with their work.

Mail order is a nightmare. More than once I've wound up paying more for the shipping than the goods. It's worse when you dont drive as you can't simply say you will come and collect it. But having said that there are a lot of genuine people too who cahrge fairly. Once i brought somethign froma shop and the actual shipping they charged was actually less than the postage they had to pay. Traders are just normal human beings, some wish no harm, others are just out to screw you for all they can get.

I think there were two major probolems. Firstly, and overwhelmingly marketing. Atari never got ir gihts from the mid 80's onwards. The launh of the Jagur, Lynx and Falcon were all pathetic. The Jaguar was technically great, but the competition didn't even have to bat an eyelid. Secondly was the handling of the Falcon. Reyling the ST's case was stupid. by that time everyone wanting expandable systems. Their attempt to address that with the 040 Falcon wqs good, but was cancelled, when it was practcially ready to ship.

This was a great game made in the early 90's, I think orginally for the PC, though it came out on the Mega Drive (which I played it on), and the Jaguar as well as a cartridge. It's predecessor, Another World was released on the ST, but did this make it accross as well?

I imagine there would be a lot of interest, if it were affordable, there are still a lot more standard ST/STe's than any of the other models out there. Some areas I think where the ethernec triped up first time was: 1. Lack of info on just what you could expect. It hooks up to a 68000 8Mhz 1mb ST fine, we know. But what download speeds could you expect on that kind of machine, how fast would network apps run? Which ones could be used or not? Some benhmarks and experiences put on a central website would be useful to people deciding what to use their old machines for, and what to stick with falcons/tt's/clones for. 2. Walk though software set up. Not having networked an Atari before, I'd be totally in the blue about where to start. A "10 steps to setting up an ST with ethernec" would be good, and a lot cheaper than printing a manual. 3. Talk to people. I've sent off emails asking about hardware upgrades and they never get back to me. Hundreds of people might be ready to spend their money, but it's no good if there's no one there to take it.

ah, Chess, always fun, still got Chessmaster 200 for the ST somewhere. Managed to beat it a few times so I like that I remeber Gauntlet from the 8-bit, it was great on that, what's the port to the Lynx like?

ah CompuServe, I remember them:( Here in the UK phone charges were astronomical and that was a big disincentive for a lot of people, though it wans't so bad when it was only BBS's since even with the slow modems ( though I had a really quick 1200 baud modem, well it seemed really quick back then, anyway!) . I came to the net quite late (early 90's) and by then Email was all the rage and i used that mainly. The web was already in existence (just about) but there wasn't a great deal on there yet and it seemed quite useless in comparison to Gopher. I remeber being really sad when gopher died. BBS were great with an 800XL (hindsight warning, using portable TV as cheapo monitor substitute = such a bad idea) though I only used it very breifly and most of my surfing was done on an already-old PC with a B&W monitor, DOS 3 and later, Win3.1 and Mosaic, which I thought was such a neat name for computer software:)

Well it's good to take full advantage of the VME port, but see the point about the ST/STe. Getting decent network and graphics upgrades for them now is a bit of a nightmare. I would love to see a development for the standard machines that could bring modern graphics to them. I have the old Panther ISA/ET4000 adapter (pretty hard to find now), and I dont see really why there couldn't be a modern development along similar lines, perhaps with multiple slots to allow multiple cards to be fitted allowing both graphics and network without having to use up the cartridge port.

been told to make that belongs, btu hey, she still doesn't use it She has discovered DVD's....